Thanks for sharing this! I'm trying to get more familiar with the nitty-gritty of Rust (read: the borrowing paradigm :) ), and these types of tutorials are my favorite way of doing that.
Great write-up; really interesting that the CPU ended up being the bottleneck in this experiment! Regarding the cost of sending this data out of AWS, did you run into any issues there using rsync? IIRC rsync copies the data over TCP, so wouldn't this end up being expensive as well? Generally, though, that was my favorite part of the experiment!
I don't care quite as much about the lack of a proven track-record -- I understand the value there, but I love tinkering and trust Rust enough to not have any concerns about core stability (maybe a mistake, but there it is). It's mostly the lack of a stable HTTP library / ecosystem that throws me off; it seems like everything there is changing pretty frequently. That's just my impression though, and I'd love to be wrong :) I mentioned in another thread as well that the last time I played around with Rust, it seemed like most of the useful Cargo packages were dependent on the nightly version, which definitely gave me pause. I can't seem to find any of these packages now, though, so that's either changed or was an incorrect impression.
I started playing around with Rust a few weeks ago and fell in love; it has some quirks for sure (the whole borrowing system is a bit tough to grok at first) but it didn't take long for me to start seeing things the "Rust way." My only hang-up with it right now is that so many of the most useful packages in Cargo depend on the nightly build of Rust.
I know the basics of C, but stopped short of getting deep into threading and concurrency since it seems like Go and Rust handle that in a more efficient way (although there's no way I would use Rust in production yet). Are there any advantages to using C/C++ for a new large-scale project?
This is absolutely true. I work for a YC-backed startup and sometimes felt like that "star in the sky" wasn't there, and worried that my lack of faith was disturbing (to quote movies). Thankfully, the founders here are open enough that I was able to voice my concerns, and it turns out that I had a totally incorrect idea of the product/market fit that they were/are aiming for. As a core member of the dev team, this could have been a potentially catastrophic misunderstanding. So yeah, everyone being on the same page and seeing that same goal is really crucial.
Interesting that militant opposition to the police is associated with the right-wing; not trying to nitpick or condemn, in Ferguson that was absolutely true. Here in NYC it's still not, though, and generally I feel like resistance to armed government forces has generally been more left-aligned.
For me, it's the wealth of tutorials and set-up information, as well as the straight-forward nature of their interface (both at a web and shell level). The pricing model is also fantastic.
> I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?” Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target.
It all comes back to this. I was listening Aaron Harris' interview with Digital Ocean's Mitch Wainer on Startup School Radio the other day (phenomenal podcast). Wainer mentioned how people actually love Digital Ocean, and how rare it is for that word in particular to be paired with the name of a company. I think it's said so often that it can easily be glossed over, but that word is not chosen lightly. Having a product users actually love is extremely difficult, and extremely rewarding.
"...the W3C has already become borderline irrelevant to the future of the web, as it has been far too slow to standardise everyday technologies that have been widely deployed in browsers for a considerable time"
This is a bold statement, but one that I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with. I suppose now it's a matter of figuring out what should replace the W3C; things are only going to move faster.
It seems like the potential fork in bitcoin is already happening to some degree with Elements and the sidechain (https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements) -- a super interesting project that I just found out about yesterday! I can't help but feel, to a certain degree, like forking bitcoin is re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic though. There already seem to be more viable alternative cryptocurrencies.
"British regulators approved the trial in just 17 days, and the testing company, based in Massachusetts, did not have an adequate response plan in the event of a disastrous adverse reaction, British investigators concluded."
It can, however, be useful to get invoices for purchases that were discounted down to $0.00. At the startup I'm with we often give new customers a $0.00 trial rate, but they still want invoices so their billing department can keep track. Of course, this billing system isn't using PayPal, but just a thought.
I think wikipedia (along with Google) really allowed for the current transition to over-abundance of easily accessibly information -- at least in developed countries. For better or worse, I think we've started moving towards only considering application of knowledge to be a worthwhile topic of study, instead of just gaining it. If this is true, it'd be pretty catastrophic for services like wikipedia to suddenly disappear.
My parents recently moved to Turkey, and I set them up with NordVPN (good service and easy to use for non-technical people). All they really wanted to watch was Star Trek: TNG anyway, which, even after the big availability push, is not available via Turkish Netflix. Without being able to do that, they will certainly cancel that subscription.
I love this summary, it really touches on all the core issues. However, even though bitcoin has such severe flaws, I think that cryptocurrency in general is still really promising. I've been particularly excited about ethereum for the past two years or so, and progress on that project definitely seems to be happened (although it's not a currency per se). The concept of the block chain still has massive potential.
But how do you reconcile that with the public fear of losing jobs due to the increase in automation? I think driverless cars represent in a big way due to the prevalence of truck driving as a profession in the US; not saying they can't be reconciled, just flagging it as an issue.
Although it wouldn't explicitly allow that, it's a short leap to make. That would be even more difficult to enforce though, and would mostly only impact those who are frequently arrested (pretty much the same downsides as the current issue, but on a more exaggerated scale).
I agree that the suggestions are great; I'm also generally happy to see a letter like this take a clear tone without being aggressive or overtly confrontational. Re: the prevalence JS/HTML projects, I think that may just be a matter of simple base popularity; the web is the most popular development platform, and JS is the most used language on github (githut.info has great stats on this). If the letter gains steam, I'm sure we could expect project maintainers from other ecosystems to get on board.
Yeah, they often propose legislation that just seems like "How far can we really go?" test. Even if this did pass, it would be virtually impossible to enforce an anti-encryption policy at a large scale. It would only end up effecting the people who are already in custody, further compounding the existing problems with prosecution of the poor here.